Page 61 of No Charm Done

“Too thoughtful.” Jerusha rolled her eyes. “So thoughtful, we may all die of moral virtue before we actually do anything. Now, can we please get back to the part where we humiliate some billionaires?”

Scarlett picked up her phone to study the press release again. But this time, she zoomed in on the photo at the top of the page. “Wow, check this out . . .” She held up the phone to show everyone. “Look at the relic standing next to Vex. Which one is he, Statler or Waldorf?”

Jasper peered across the table. “He looks like Cornelius Vanderbilt. Straight out of the Whaling-Company Gentleman Starter Kit.”

“The contrast with Vex is pretty wild,” offered Nate. “Like Steve Jobs meets Ebenezer Scrooge.”

Luna snickered. “One invented an app; the other invented the horseless carriage.”

Delilah squinted at the caption and read it aloud in a faux-aristocratic voice: “Ahem! Pictured above, Ashton Vex poses with his primary investor: Upson Burke, III.”

The shatter of glass cut through the pub like a rifle shot. Elias’s pint glass had exploded on the floor, beer and glass shards spreading across the old wood in a glittering pool.

But that wasn’t what made Luna’s heart stop. It was his face. He’d gone white. Not pale, not wan—white. His fingers were still curved around the ghost of the glass he’d been holding.

“You okay?” she asked, but Elias didn’t seem to hear her.

“How,” he said slowly, “is that motherfucker still alive?”

Chapter 19

Boy Kings

Valley of the Kings, Egypt

November 1922

Frankie was going to get them both killed, and the little bastard would probably be grinning like a fox when it happened.

Elias pressed his handkerchief to his nose, stifling a sneeze. Around him lay the treasures of a long-dead boy king, scattered like trash after a burglary. Grave robbers had made a mess: smashed pottery, overturned furniture, bits of gold leaf crushed into the floor. But really, how different was that from what they were doing right now?

“The big boss man, Howard Carter, he calls this archaeology? I call it looting with a graduate degree.”

“Elias.” His brother’s voice floated up, muffled behind a funerary couch. “Quit lecturing and get hunting. We’re on the clock.”

Franklin Shaw, known as Frankie to anyone who loved him, which was pretty much everyone, was twenty-one years old and completely in his element. Where Elias was perpetually out of place in this suffocating tomb, Frankie moved through it like he’d been born underground. The air was musty, and Elias was hyper-aware of the grit of crushed gold leaf sticking to his palms, a reminder of what they were doing: grave-robbing in the Valley of the Kings. Frankie had been doing this type of work for Upson Burke for two years now, ‘liberating’ magical artifacts from Alexandria to Tehran.

He had the easy confidence of someone who’d neither experienced nor even considered the word consequences. Elias, on the other hand, knew all about consequences. Consequences were why he’d needed to put six thousand miles between himself and a very angry Chicago gangster, whose girlfriend had made some regrettable decisions involving Elias and a hotel room.

“Looking for what, exactly? This place has already been cleaned out.”

“Not quite.” Frankie was on his hands and knees, peering under things and running his fingers along the wall bases. “Burke said it would be here. Something small the other thieves missed.”

“The old bastard say what we’re looking for?”

“Nope.” Frankie flashed that grin that had gotten both of them out of (and into!) more trouble than Elias cared to remember. “Just said I’d know it when I found it.”

Elias crouched beside an overturned chest, half-heartedly sifting through debris, mainly gold leaf and some stones. Nothing screamed “powerful magical artifact,” but the truly powerful ones never did.

“You know,” Elias said, “there’s a word for what we’re doing here.”

“Procurement?”

“Grave-robbing.”

“Procurement sounds better.” Frankie had moved to the far corner now, shifting aside a broken canopic jar. “Besides, Carter’s doing the same thing. He’s going to put it all in a museum instead of Burke’s private collection. What’s the difference?”

“Gift shop?”